Good Code Podcast Episode 3: Luke Stark on Emotions in the Digital Realm

Good Code is a weekly podcast about ethics in our digital world. We look at ways in which our increasingly digital societies could go terribly wrong, and speak with those trying to prevent that. Each week, our host Chine Labbé engages with a different expert on the ethical dilemmas raised by our ever-more pervasive digital technologies. Good Code is a dynamic collaboration between the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech and journalist Chine Labbé.

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On this episode:

Stark is fascinated by the ways in which computers quantify and reshape our emotions. This fascination of his started when he realized, as a teenager, how necessary it was for him to use emoticons in order to get his point across in the digital sphere.

We ask him about emojis, animojis and all the stickers and reaction icons that exist online.

We get his view on the Disney-Pixar movie “Inside Out,” and we talk about facial recognition, a set of technologies that constitute, in his view, “the plutonium of AI.”

You can listen to this episode on iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play, TuneIn, YouTube, and on all of your favorite podcast platforms.

We talked about:

• In a 2014 article entitled “The conservatism of emoji,” Luke Stark and his co-author Kate Crawford write that “emojis are the social lubricant smoothing the rough edges of our digital lives.” “They underscore tone, introduce humor, and give us a quick way to bring personality into otherwise monochrome spaces,” they write.
• In this episode, we talk about the History of emojis. Read about it in Wired.
• Stark mentions some research he has done on Mood Panda, a mood-tracking app based out of the UK, and through which people can anonymously share their feelings and get support.
• In May 2017, a leaked report from executives at Facebook Australia detailed how the social network could monitor moments in which young Australians felt down or depressed.
• In a September 2015 article published in the LA Review of Books, Luke Stark and his co-author Anna Lauren Hoffmann explained why they thought the Disney-Pixar movie “Inside Out” represented “a potentially dangerous line of thinking.”
• In this episode, Stark also mentions a study that showed a correlation between Instagram post colors and mental health. Read about it here.
• Stark is very critical of facial recognition. He calls it the “plutonium of AI,” and thinks its use should be restricted to a very small number of applications. His boss, Microsoft president Brad Smith, has called for government regulation, but he is more optimistic about what facial recognition has to offer.

Read more:

• According to this NBC news investigation, companies may have scraped your photo online without your consent in order to conduct research on facial recognition. In the article, you can check whether your Flickr photos were secretly entered into an IBM dataset.
• At a recent conference, Luke Stark referred to this May 2017 article in Medium. It’s about facial recognition, and it’s called “Physiognomy’s new clothes.” The paper details a problematic Chinese study of criminals, and cautions against feedback loops.
• Read about the emotion detection industry, and one of its companies, Affectiva, which claims to have “the largest emotion data repository in the world.”
• And finally, a little bit on emoji diversity, and whether or not we should get rid of white emojis.